Who in the sunshine, who in the night time, Who by high ordeal, who by common trial...

And who shall I say is calling?

--Leonard Cohen, "Who By Fire" 

Our trip was nearing its end. And I admit, I had gotten a little burnt out from the elaborate planning we'd done to get ourselves through five countries and many, many destinations in two weeks. So when it came time to book accomodations for our one night in Milan... I just... didn't. I kept meaning to. I looked on couchsurfing. I looked on Air Bnb. I considered various hostels. But at the end of the day, what it came down to, was that I was sick of planning. We were gonna wing it for our last night in Milan.

This was a stupid idea.

Our plane was one of those board-a-bus-to-go-50-feet-onto-the-tarmac-then-get-off-the-bus-and-walk-up-the-stairs kind of planes.

Hustlin it through the airport in Milan to catch a train.

By the time we arrived in Milan, around 10, we'd woken with the hot Mediterranean sunrise, (Jo even went for one more swim before leaving), driven about 4 hours on mountainous, narrow, oceanside highways, almost faced the prospect of being stuck in Krujë and missing our flight because our car was planted in the back of an expensive Mercedes, flown about 2 hours back to Milan, gone through customs, gotten our bags, found the train and only just caught one of the last ones going into Milan proper. When we emerged from the train station and gotten our bearings, I was completely exhausted. I hadn't liked Milan that much the first or the second time I'd passed through, and I didn't feel excited about being back for a long night without any place to sleep. But I had talked Jo into skipping the Duomo on her way in because I had been in a hurry to move on to Venice, so that's where we headed.

   

After bathing in the otherworldly majesty of this crazy ornate church we wandered over to the edge of the square where we found an outrageously overpriced restaurant and settled in to one more pizza and some well-earned alcohol. Afterwards we felt more relaxed and optimistic, so when I suggested we head back to Ostello Bello, where I'd had such good luck the first time around, we figured why not.

Dinnertime view with our companions, Big Boy Blue and Jo's pitifully unnamed pack.

The moment when Joanna realized she could no longer pretend she didn't need glasses: when I observed the statues at the top of the spires on the church and she remarked that no, there wasn't anything up there. I gave her my glasses and she had to admit defeat; couldn't see half the detail on the church. (These photos are mostly courtesy of Jo!)

This was a good idea.

Not only did they have a bed for me (which I didn't end up using, but I paid for just on principle, because I liked the place and because they were good to us), they let Jo and I hang out in the common room/bar all night and they gave us both their customary free welcome drink even though only I paid for a room. They also gave us free shots of Limoncello and t-shirts because it was their 10th anniversary. So we forwent sleep and spent the night laughing and drinking with like-minded wayfarers and the employees, and soon after the sun rose we rode the metro back to the train station, where Jo headed for a train to take her to the airport. Her flight was leaving bright and early but mine wasn't until late afternoon, so after as emotional a goodbye as we have ever had (I couldn't have asked for a better travel companion or all-around friend) I headed back to the hostel to shower, get some free breakfast and coffee, pack up my things, mail those stupid Albanian postcards, and head off to the airport myself.

There isn't much left to tell of the amazing adventures I had last summer. It was a long trip back from Milan: first to the Budapest airport, then on the bus to the closest metro station, then onto the metro into the center of town and Nyugati Station, where another train waited to carry me on my quiet, dazed way back to Göd. It felt like a lifetime and a half had passed since I'd left; I felt the way Bilbo Baggins did upon returning to the Shire. It's hard to explain the weirdness of waking up in one country, in a tent, by the beach, and falling asleep in another, 1300 km away, in (temporarily) your own tiny couch-bed. It feels so utterly alien and jarring that maybe for a couple minutes you close your eyes and you feel the warm Hungarian night's air rush in through the train's open windows and you block out the voices of the passengers around you and you feel completely dislocated from all time and space. You just are, without location, without age or past or future, just the purest present tense you will ever know. It's what it is to travel, I guess. Here's to many more summers like it.

Crushin' It in Krujë

The next day we woke to the heat of late-August Albanian sunlight and the clamor of a hundred backpackers packing up and shipping out. We devoured our free toast, jam, and instant coffee with minimal complaints and after drinking real coffees we purchased at the bar, we hit the road. We still had about 4 hours of driving and we were determined to wring one more Albanian city out of our trip before heading to the airport: Krujë.

We couldn't resist stopping here to capture a few more shots of the seaside mountains. What I wouldn't have given for one more day, to sit around and just soak this in. Alas. It was at this stop that we thought to document our valiant chariot. Behold, the Opel Corsa:

Just a lovely country lane. Also a national highway.

Passing Fier, making progress, taking in some Albanian hotties.

Finally, in early afternoon we found ourselves in Krujë. We made it! Our timing was good! We even had time to wander through the famous-for-its-souvenirs bazaar in the town. We parked the Corsa facing downhill, wondered briefly if that was a bad idea, put on the parking brake (an absolute necessity in the Balkans), and headed off to shop.

The Krujë castle in the distance. After we'd done our part for the local economy we headed back to the car, ready to make our way to the airport. Once again we hadn't sent our postcards but otherwise we'd done almost everything we had set out to do in Albania and we were feeling pretty good about life. And then: disaster. Or: almost disaster. I'll let the email I sent my parents relate the harrowing tale,

I have one story to tell you guys I want to get down before I forget... Jo and I went to the town of Kruja, where the national hero Skanderbeg was born [edit: not true, and I don't know why I was laboring under this impression] and where there is a very impressive bazaar full of souvenir goodies, and when we parked we did so facing downward on a hill behind a pretty nice-looking Mercedes. We realized our mistake as soon as Jo pulled in behind it and we took a minute to wonder if we should move the car then but decided instead to go to the market with the hope that the car would move by the time we got back. 

It didn't so when we returned and Jo tried to reverse away from the car we found that our little hatchback's engine just didn't have what it took and we were rolling closer and closer forward, toward the car. We didn't know what to do so we thought maybe if we let it slide as gently as it could into the Mercedes we might be able stabilize enough to back away and so with a VERY upsetting crack, Jo let it roll into the back of the Mercedes (I was outside trying to give her an idea of how close she was). Thankfully both of our bumpers were plastic so there was no damage but we were pretty distraught to find that even resting against the other car the Corsa just couldn't get back up the hill in reverse. So we both stood there, kind of devastated and at a loss, until an old man who had been walking by and had turned to see where the noise of our collision came from, walked back around and very calmly picked up a big rock from the side of the road and put it in front of our front wheel. So simple. In retrospect, so obvious. But so completely crucial in getting us out of that bind. And so Jo was able to back the car up, let it rest on the rock, back it up, rest on the rock, until Jo could pull it out from behind the Mercedes.... 

For both of us it was just a very memorable thing because this old man who had no stake in our fates showed us such a simple but completely life-saving trick that got us out of a mess. We had several encounters kind of like that. People who didn't need to helping us in ways that completely saved the day.

This is why I'm gonna go back to the Balkans. This is why I'm not done with Eastern Europe, and it's not done with me.

We made one more terrible mistake that day: we returned our car to Hertz, which was in walking distance of the tiny airport, before we mailed our postcards. We realized our mistake when we got inside said airport, where I think it was totally reasonable to expect there to be a post office, only to find that not the case. We flirted with the idea of one or both of us tempting fate some more and taking the bus back into Tiranë to mail them, but we realized we'd probably just about used up that day's portion of luck. That didn't stop us from feeling a little bitter about our mistake, though, especially when the airport taunted us thusly:

It sure did have some fancy chandeliers, though. 

So we settled in to one of the three cafes and ordered some mediocre sandwiches and whiled away our remaining hours in one of the most frustrating, beautiful, HOT, and incredibly generous places I have ever traveled to. Soon enough our flight appeared on the board and we headed towards the security check. I can't speak for Jo, but for myself, I felt that the trip was winding down and that surely our adventure in Krujë had been our last. Milan had other plans.

Albania, Albania, your land is mostly mountainous and your chief export is chrome...

Even as I write this I'm listening to this and laughing, as Jo sang this to me so many times I began singing along somewhere around Gjirokaster. This post is going to talk mostly about Tirana and Berat, because just like every other place we visited, we took a TON of pictures that would probably break my sad little internet connection if I tried to upload them all at once.

The ride to Tirana was hot, mostly, as Bato kept the windows down but the AC off. There were a couple other passengers besides Jo and myself, and after we sat for the customary century and a half at the border, we were allowed in. There were some hills and mountains, although it felt less like the Balkans than when we had been in Kotor. Mostly it was just kind of rough highway road.

We stopped somewhere in Albania to have some coffee and a bathroom break, and got to know our driver and other passengers a bit more. Bato has been doing this shuttle thing for some time, but he told us it was hard to find someone on the Albanian side doing the same thing. He didn't seem to think it a country full of very trust-worthy people. I had a moment of inspiration towards the end of our coffee break when he told us he would be picking up people in Tirana and returning to Kotor and Budva. I asked him, if we threw some money his way and paid for postage, if he'd mind mailing some postcards for us. He said he'd do it for free but we ended up not having a lot of small change so he got five Euros out of the deal. He could have easily walked away with our money (I mean, not a ton of it, but still..) but he gave me his email address and told me to send him a message later and when I did, he replied with this picture, albeit this is a slightly edited version since my parents' address is on there:

Sure enough, our loved ones got those postcards. The Good Montenegrin, y'all. What a champ.

Albanian crest/symbol/whatever you'd call it, prominently displayed at the center of a roundabout in Tirane.

(From another angle, courtesy of Jo.)

  

By the time we got to Tirana, it was HOT. No joke. Bato dropped us off at the center and we walked about a block, took out some Albanian lek, and then decided it was time to find some food, wifi, and AC. We did all three of those things at a very comfortable but pretty middle of the road Italian restaurant nearby.

I promise I didn't spend the whole trip on my devices. Just the parts where we were figuring out where the hell we were! For our Albanian leg of the trip Jo and I decided to rent a car, since there was a hell of a lot we wanted to see in this country and a small amount of time we had to work with. We were determined to get all the way down to Sarande and Butrint, one of the coolest places I have ever been in my life. We saw so many incredible things in Albania and it totally would not have been possible without our shitty, underpowered little rental car. I will say that. So the easiest thing was just to take a taxi to the car rental place (HERTZ, CALLING YOU OUT) as it was near the airport and thus, not close to us. When we got there we had to sit and wait for the one (very nice) employee to be finished with another customer, at which point we told him our information and his face crinkled up in confusion and I knew we were fucked.

Turns out, they didn't have the reservation. In what was really totally lucky for us, the ONE automatic car that they had was due to be returned the next day. The guy working informed us that it was another American who had it and even showed me his driver's license (illegal?). So we had a night to kill in Tirana, which had not been in the plan, and Jo started looking up cheap backpackers hostels we could try. I vetoed that almost immediately; I was hot, I was tired, I had climbed a mountain the day before. I was staying in a real fucking hotel. So we went to the International Whatever Hotel of Albania and got the online discount (fyi: they charge a different price when you just walk up to the counter than they do online but if mention the difference they'll give you the online price). 

  

No regrets.

Also funny: the taxi driver who picked us up spoke a bit of English and was very friendly, so he gave us his information in case we needed a ride again while we were in Tirana. He was also a Rihanna superfan but that's a different story. We thanked him after arriving at the Hertz stop, not expecting to see him again. Imagine all of our surprise when an hour later we called him back to ask him for another ride, this time back to the center to the very nice hotel located there. And by our I mean Jo's and mine, because although he seemed kind of bemused with our situation he didn't seem exactly surprised. We probably should have taken that for a sign as how things would go in Albania.

  

  

Statue of Skanderbeg, national hero, who was trained by and fought for the Ottoman empire before deserting and becoming a symbol of Albanian Christianity and nationalism, in the center of the traffic circle. Best photo my POS camera could get of him at night!

  

Later, after soaking up all the sub-par, not-very-cold AC we could handle, we got out of the hotel and walked around the center a bit, looking for food. This is the mosque whose minaret you can see up in the picture I took from our hotel room. Its lighting was... bright. Very bright.

 We had a decent enough dinner and found a nice bookshop where we stocked up on postcards we would, once again, end up not mailing in their country of origin, before heading back to sleep. The hotel included a free international breakfast so the next morning we feasted, planning our route for that day on Jo's tablet/phone, both of which would end up being a blessing.

Here's the thing about Google Maps. It is a great and very useful invention that has saved me many a times from all manner of lostness. And when you are in a city there is nothing better to get from point A to point B. But if you are in a part of the world where the streets are more of an homage to the idea of transit, really just a series of rubble and rocks rolling around a field of dust and smaller rocks, Google Maps kind of falls down on the job. Especially if your very clever but perhaps not accustomed to these conditions friend plans the route using the "most direct" option. When this happens, you might just find yourself spending two hours driving (more like rolling, in neutral, riding the brakes) at 8 miles per hour between boulders on what we lovingly came to call the "Albanian Superhighway".

The upshot of having said tablets is that Jo had GPS, which enabled us to check our actual location against our screenshots of the Google Maps route and realize that we were, in fact, going the right way and that we really did have to continue on this wretched stretch of rubble for another hour, unless we wanted to backtrack for an hour and take the real highway. Silver linings!

One of the better paved sections. 

This car came racing at us and Jo actually stopped the car so we could gape in amazement as it flew past, engine screaming, frame bouncing, passengers jostling. Bold move, Albanian driver.

The point where we finally rejoined the actual highway, a study in contrast.

Finally we made it to our first Albanian destination, Berat. It's a city that historically got tossed around during Albania's long history of being geographically desirable for various empires, including the Byzantines and most notably for Berat's architecture, the Ottomans (windows, windows everywhere! Seriously, it's working hard for its nicknames, "One above another/a thousand Windows" and "The City of Two Thousand Steps") and became a UNESCO World Heritage site pretty recently. You can see the the style of house I'm talking about in this picture, and then on the hill above is the citadel of Berat.

  

Sheep crossin'.

Say that street name 10 times fast, if you dare.

Orthodox church, large central area in downtown (?) Berat.

Sufi mosque, The Halveti Tekke, in the heart of Berat. This is the front, from the street. Supposedly the columns were taken from the Greek city of Apollonia.

  

Map of the compound.

Religious housing.

I think this was a mausoleum, at one point? I don't know. Maybe Jo remembers. In any case, it was a breathtaking old building and we spent a lot of time just standing, gawking at the ceiling. I think the guy who unlocked it for us thought we were crazy. He was speaking to us in a mixture of English, Italian, and a few other languages and I was not at any point during our "conversation" sure if he was yelling at us for having come to see the place or telling us its history.

Maybe both.

  

  

Minaret, seen from the inner courtyard between the buildings.

Inside the prayer hall: 

    

Maybe one of my favorite pictures, the downstairs common area as viewed through the shroud/railing that separates the women's balcony from the rest of the building.

  

The Bachelors' Dormitory, located a few blocks away closer to the Osum River.

  

Artsy selfies are a must during late-afternoon rambles in the hottest city in Albania. Later we stopped for some hydration at a cafe in the local promenade, which was being ripped up and rebuilt while we were there but which our guidebook assured us was once the height of Albanian Communist nightlife, aka drinking coffee and gawking at each other while walking back and forth along the same one mile stretch of sidewalk. We decided to order MORE pizza. Seriously, you maybe wouldn't expect it, but the pizza is really very decent all the way down the Adriatic coast, there wasn't a dog in the bunch. We waited for quite a while and when it finally showed up it was still in its delivery box. Because despite its being on the menu, it wasn't actually on OUR cafe's menu. But nevermind. It was good all the same.

 

Shaky Berat nighttime shot. Stupid camera.

To sleep, we stayed in Berat Backpackers Hostel which I would freely recommend to anyone passing through. Not only is it located in the car-inaccessible (basically, although some foolhardy souls tried) center of Gorica, one of the historic neighborhoods in Berat, it's a converted house in the same style as its surroundings, which meant that somehow Jo and I managed to have a 4-bed room all to ourselves that looked like this.

To be honest, it was hot as balls all day and most of the night in Berat but we flung open all the windows and bathed in bug spray and were pretty happy with the way things turned out. We only spent one night in this place so after wandering around for a bit and taking a decadent but definitely necessary midday nap, we headed to a traditional restaurant recommended to us by the really awesome hostel owner and feasted on all sorts of meats and breads. It was a great meal. The owner also sells beer and was making dinner for a pretty cheap price that we would've partaken in if we weren't set on Albanian food, and had a free breakfast as well. When we told him the tale of our Albanian Superhighway adventure he was extremely helpful in sorting us out for the next leg of our trip. Eternally grateful to that guy!

Final reason this place is awesome, beside the ambiance, the people, the food, the facilities and the location: fresh grapes, citrus, and figs growing in the porch/balcony common area. I could have probably stayed a week in Berat. But I could say that for any of the places we stayed in Albania.

Jo and I did consider climbing up to see the Berat citadel/castle in the evening but after the wild success and fatigue of climbing an actual fucking mountain in Kotor and white-knuckling it for two hours on the superhighway we decided instead to stroll lazily around the FLAT, mostly quiet town. The next day, however... we drove up to see it. Hashtag sorry not sorry. It's actually a very cool area as it still houses the Kalaja district, with many people living and working either within the citadel or in the town below.

Stunningly communist-looking statue in the citadel's parking area.

Looking down at the Osum river and Berat. 

The hill and its buildings and people were influenced and expanded on by a bunch of various Byzantine rulers, and I'm assuming Konstanin Hadh (sp?) is probably in there somewhere.

  

Climbing up to the citadel, looking at the 13th-century Byzantine church of the Holy Trinity.

The Tomorr mountains, I think?

Lace for sale. Get your lace!

Looking across the river at what I believe is the Shpirag mountain. Jo and I searched in vain, looking for supposed Illyrian ruins that can be seen on the hills surrounding Berat but we never saw anything. Let me know if you can (or did).

Clothesline full of beautiful, handmade (looking, anyway) textiles were all over the town inside the fortress, and although I was seriously tempted now that we had a car, I knew I'd still have to carry that on my back eventually.

Driving up to and exploring the citadel was a peaceful and very interesting start to our second full day in Albania, and fortified from our huge traditional meal the night before, plus a good night of sleep in a traditional Berati bedroom, we were ready to forge further down and further in, through the mountains and over much tamer highways... to the wilds of Gjirokastra/Gjirokastër.